One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment

by Mei Fong Narrated by Janet Song

Overview

When Communist Party leaders adopted the one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birth-rates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China closes the book on the policy after more than three decades, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers.



Mei Fong has spent years documenting the policy's repercussions on every sector of Chinese society. In One Child, she explores its true human impact, traveling across China to meet the people who live with its consequences. Their stories reveal a dystopian reality: unauthorized second children ignored by the state, only-children supporting aging parents and grandparents on their own, villages teeming with ineligible bachelors, and an ungoverned adoption market stretching across the globe. Fong tackles questions that have major implications for China's future: whether its "Little Emperor" cohort will make for an entitled or risk-averse generation; how China will manage to support itself when one in every four people is over sixty-five years old; and above all, how much the one-child policy may end up hindering China's growth.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - John Parker

…[Fong] makes disconcertingly clear that the repercussions of population control will continue to reverberate throughout China. The policy itself remains a monument to official callousness, and Fong's book pays moving testimony to the suffering and forbearance of its victims…The greatest strength of Fong's book is her reporting…

From the Publisher

Honorable Mention, ASJA 2017 Writing Awards "A searing, important, and eminently readable exploration of China's one-child policy." — NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS “The policy itself remains a monument to official callousness, and Fong’s book pays moving testimony to the suffering and forbearance of its victims.” — NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "Not to be missed ... [Fong] combines tough, broad economic analysis with individual stories." — ECONOMIST / 1843 “A timely, important work that takes stock of the one-child policy’s damage…ONE CHILD is, like the policy’s abolition, long overdue, and Ms. Fong was the perfect person to write it.” — WALL STREET JOURNAL “Fong’s fine book is a moving and at times harrowing account of the significance of decisions taken by a small coterie of men with too much faith in science and ideology, and too little in humanity.” — GUARDIAN “Fong writes eloquently and with an authority that reflects her knowledge of many cultures ... A deeply moving account of a policy that looks set to haunt China (and the world) for decades.” — INDEPENDENT (UK) “With impeccable timing, [Fong's] new book offers a superb overview... Fong writes in an easy, accessible style, and in 200 pages takes us behind the scenes of the Sichuan earthquake, the Olympic stadium in Beijing, the dancing grannies, the migrant workers, the orphanages, the transnational adoption of Chinese baby girls, birth tourism, and surrogacy. She fills in the background to these familiar subjects with impressive research and interviews, conducted over many years.” — LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS "Fong excels in telling the personal stories of others, providing the reader with insight into how an Orwellian policy, rarely understood by outsiders, has played out in the lives of over a billion people." — MS. “The country's one-child policy, to be officially phased out in 2016, created more far-reaching social distortions than even its most vociferous critics realized, argues Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fong in this timely exposé of a reproductive regime whose inner workings Chinese officials have tried hard to keep under wraps… Finished just before the announcement of the policy's demise, One Child is a touching and captivating anthropological investigation of one of the most invasive laws ever devised.” — KIRKUS REVIEWS "Timely ... Compassionate ... Fong illumines individual grief and dignity ... [Her] human-scale portrayal of individual stories, weaving in her own fraught journey toward motherhood as well, makes for an approachable and edifying treatment." — LIBRARY JOURNAL “Mei Fong’s brilliant exploration of China’s one-child policy must change the way we talk about China’s rise. One Child is lucid, humane, and unflinching; it is vital reading for anyone focused on the future of China’s economy, its environment, or its politics. It not only clarifies facts and retires myths, but also confronts the deepest questions about the meaning of parenthood.” — EVAN OSNOS, National Book Award-winning author of Age of Ambition “Eye-opening, powerful, and utterly gripping, One Child had me hooked from page one. Mei Fong possesses a rare eye —

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"Finished just before the announcement of the policy's demise, One Child is a touching and captivating anthropological investigation of one of the most invasive laws ever devised." —Kirkus

Library Journal - Audio

06/01/2016
China's infamous one-child policy lasted just 35 years. Forced sterilizations, gruesome late-term abortions, an overseas adoption boom, and baby trafficking emerged as by-products of the draconian law. What was touted as a "necessary step in [China's] Herculean efforts to lift the population…from abject poverty" resulted in repercussions that "continue to shape how one in six people in the world are born, live, and die." The consequences were dire: the policy "rapidly created a population that is too old, too male, and quite possibly, too few." Generations of singletons are caught in a preposterous bind: overcoddled and overindulged, while facing impossible expectations by desperate parents. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fong, whose Malaysian Chinese background provided insider access, blends policy and the personal experiences of those affected for a staggering first title; alas, it's better read on the page. Narrator Janet Song sounds as if she's too often on the verge of tears, which might be appropriate for the most inhumane tragedies, but the less wrenching sections hardly warrant such overwrought pitch. VERDICT The disappointing presentation pales in comparison to the significance of the contents, making Child an important acquisition for all libraries intending to enhance their international collections. ["Fong's human-scale portrayal of individual stories, weaving in her own fraught journey toward motherhood as well, makes for an approachable and edifying treatment": LJ 1/16 starred review of the Houghton Harcourt hc.]—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Library Journal

★ 01/01/2016
This timely investigative report, researched and written (excepting a minor update, not seen at time of review) before the recent dismantling of China's infamous one-child policy, clearly predicts its demise. Malaysian-born Chinese journalist Fong writes a compassionate account of a chilling social experiment of staggering impact. The Chinese Communist Party's quota on children was implemented to address poverty and enable economic growth, but its repercussions are profound. The 35-year practice has brought a severe, chronic baby shortage to the world's most populous country, along with a shortage of women, a great and growing disproportion of elderly people, and generations of children raised in a quirky social environment, subject to both great coddling and scarily lofty expectations. Coerced abortions and sterilizations, situations of baby trafficking, and other horrors have been perpetrated on a numbingly large scale, but Fong illumines individual grief and dignity. In her travels across urban and rural China, she meets a matchmaker, a barefoot doctor, an abandoned husband, a former family planning official responsible for hundreds of forced abortions, a crusader against corruption in China's adoption system, and numerous parents, grandparents, and children. VERDICT The vast ironies and evils of the one-child policy are hard to comprehend, but Fong's human-scale portrayal of individual stories, weaving in her own fraught journey toward motherhood as well, makes for an approachable and edifying treatment.—Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

APRIL 2016 - AudioFile

In 1980, faced with a burgeoning population and its resultant economic pressures, China enacted a family-planning policy that would, with few exceptions, limit families to one child. Janet Song’s clear, smoothly paced narration is well suited to this fascinating and informative account of the effects of the one-child edict (which in 2015 was changed to a two-child policy). She guides listeners through the factual, historical, and political underpinnings of the policy and how it has affected all aspects of Chinese society. In a gentler yet straightforward tone, she also delivers heartfelt accounts of how the policy has directly and indirectly affected individuals. All in all, Song’s narration is an excellent complement to Fong’s well-organized account. S.E.G. Winner of AdioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2015-12-06
Widespread female infanticide and officials jailing pregnant women's families to induce them to surrender to abortions—these are scenes not from a dystopian novel but from China's family planning bureaucracy. The country's one-child policy, to be officially phased out in 2016, created more far-reaching social distortions than even its most vociferous critics realized, argues Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fong in this timely exposé of a reproductive regime whose inner workings Chinese officials have tried hard to keep under wraps. The author, a longtime China correspondent, crisscrossed the country talking with peasants, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and dissidents, and she narrates her travels in a conversational, convivial tone, also discussing her own struggles to conceive. Given the degree to which family planning is embedded in the fabric of the country, it is difficult to predict how the abrupt reversal will play out. Fong describes "China's birth-planning machinery" as "a bloated behemoth that goes from some 85 million part-time employees at the grass-roots level all the way up to half a million full-time employees at the National Population and Family Planning Commission." The author uncovers vast regional differences in how the law has been enforced: while some provinces saw huge numbers of women forcibly sterilized, in others, "authorities actually encouraged" large families "so they could collect more fines." Contemporary China's gender imbalance is approaching unprecedented levels, and the massive surplus of boys presages problems for both men and women. Although they contribute financially nearly as much as their husbands, women are not traditionally named on house titles, and "given that much of the recent wealth creation in China has come from appreciating values in soaring property markets, Chinese women have therefore been left out of what is arguably the biggest accumulation of residential real estate wealth in history: some $27 trillion worth" by some estimates. Finished just before the announcement of the policy's demise, One Child is a touching and captivating anthropological investigation of one of the most invasive laws ever devised.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171267506
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	02/09/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Prologue 
In the midst of the Cold War, China’s rocket scientists came up with an ambitious plan that had nothing to do with missiles, or space exploration, or weaponry of any kind.
        It concerned babies.
        On September 25, 1980, China’s Communist Party unveiled this plan through an open letter that asked members to voluntarily limit their family size to one child. The request was, in truth, an order.
        Thus began the one-child policy, the world’s most radical social experiment, which continues to irrevocably shape how one in six people in this world are born, live, and die.
        Like crash dieting, the one-child policy was begun for reasons that had merit. China’s leadership argued the policy was a necessary step in its Herculean efforts to lift a population the size of the United States’ from abject poverty. But like crash dieting, the one-child policy employed radical means and aimed for quick results, causing a rash of negative side effects.
        The excesses of the one-child policy, such as forced sterilizations and abortions, would eventually meet with global opprobrium. Balanced against this, however, is the world’s grudging admiration for China’s soaring economic growth, a success partially credited to the one-child policy.
        What we fail to understand is that China’s rapid economic growth has had little to do with its population-planning curbs. Indeed, the policy is imperiling future growth because it is rapidly creating a population that is too old, too male, and, quite possibly, too few.
        More people, not less, was one of the reasons for China’s boom. The country’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse could not have happened without abundant cheap labor from workers born during the 1960s–70s baby boom, before the one-child policy was conceived.
        To be sure, fewer births made investments in human capital more efficient — less spreading out of educational resources, for example. Many economists, however, agree that China’s rapid economic rise had more to do with Beijing’s moves to encourage foreign investment and private entrepreneurship than a quota on babies. Privatizing China’s lumbering state-owned enterprises, for example, spurred private-sector growth until it accounted for as much as 70 percent of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2005. Arthur Kroeber, one of the most prolific and respected economists who specializes in China, said, “Let’s say China grew 10%; I would be surprised if more than 0.1% of this is due to the one-child policy.”
        China’s vast cohort of workers is growing old. By 2050, one out of every four people in China will be over sixty-five. And the one-child policy has vastly shrunk the working population that must support and succor this aging army. In recent years China has made great strides in rolling out nationwide pension and health-care schemes, but the social safety net is far from adequate, and the leadership will have to do much more with much less time.
        I started reporting on China’s economic miracle in 2003 as a Wall Street Journal correspondent. I was on the factory beat, covering the workshop of the world. Every little city in southern China’s Pearl River Delta defined itself by what it made: I made regular stops at Jeans City, Bra Town, and Dollar Store center, wrote stories about the world’s largest Christmas tree factory, and about a brassiere laboratory that birthed the Wonderbra.
        Few envisioned a worker shortage then. But I was starting to hear stories about factory owners being forced to hike wages. Some resorted to offering previously unheard-of perks like TVs, badminton courts, and free condoms. Most economists at the time saw it as a short-term labor supply issue that would soon sort itself out. For how could you run out of workers in China?
        As it turned out, the work force shrinkage happened faster than anticipated. The one-child policy sharply accelerated a drop in fertility. China’s massive 800-million-person work force — larger than Europe’s population — started to contract in 2012 and will continue doing so for years to come, driving up wages and contributing to global inflationary pressures.
        After twenty years of below-replacement rates, China is taking baby steps to encourage more couples to have two children to ease demographic pressures. So far, it doesn’t appear to be working. Only about a tenth of eligible couples applied for permission to have a second child one year after Beijing introduced its most recent nationwide round of changes, a take-up below even the most pessimistic projections. Many say it’s simply too costly and stressful to raise multiple offspring in modern-day China. In that sense, the one-child policy can be judged a success, for many Chinese have thoroughly internalized the mindset that the one-child household is the ideal.
        If Beijing is unable to reverse this thinking, then somewhere in the decade between 2020 and 2030, China’s population will peak and decline. By 2100, China’s population may have declined to 1950 levels, about 500 million, a startling reversal for the world’s most populous nation. No other country has ever shed this much of its population without the aid of warfare or pestilence. And at the same time, the policy’s enforcement has occasionally been vicious, bordering on inhumane in certain cases, and it has encouraged a number of baleful side effects, from a potentially explosive gender imbalance to what is essentially a black market for adoptable infants.
        China’s one-child policy was crafted by military scientists, who believed any regrettable side effects could be swiftly mitigated and women’s fertility rates easily adjusted. China’s economists, sociologists, and demographers, who might have injected more wisdom and balance, were largely left out of the decision making, as the Cultural Revolution had starved social scientists of resources and prestige. Only the nation’s defense scientists were untouched by the purges, and they proved not the best judges of human behavior.
        The sad truth is, the harsh strictures put in place by the one-child policy were unnecessary for economic prosperity. By the 1970s, a full decade before the policy, China already had in place a highly effective and less coercive family-planning policy, called the “Later, Longer, Fewer” campaign. In the ten years the Later, Longer, Fewer campaign was in place, women in China went from having six children on average to three.
        Many demographers believed this pattern of falling fertility would have continued without the imposition of the one-child policy, a reasonable assumption considering similar fertility trajectories among neighboring Asian nations. After all, China’s neighbors also managed to slow population growth — and turbocharge their economies in the bargain — without resorting to such traumatic measures. In roughly the same period of time China’s one-child policy was in place, birthrates in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand also plummeted, from six births per woman to two or fewer.
        It is possible that if China had followed the path of these countries, investing in normal family-planning activities, fertility would be almost as low as current levels.
        Certainly its people would be happier. “Even an extra 50 to 100 million people wouldn’t have made a huge difference,” suggested University of Washington professor William Lavely, an expert on China’s fertility transition. “It wouldn’t have greatly reduced overall welfare, and in fact it may well have increased it, as many families would have been able to have the second child they need. Higher GDP per capita can’t substitute for the security and psychic benefits that some families gain from an extra child.”
        Will China be able to flip the baby switch on as successfully as it turned it off? Recent history suggests not.

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